Yosemite is such a beautiful place to say the least. We recently visited here and had a great experience. We drove in and stayed at a hotel about 25 minutes away from the entrance of Yosemite. I am happy that we did. We booked our hotel last minute and had quite an experience finding and booking a hotel. I don’t even think the fact that we booked the hotel last minute was the least of our worry in finding a place to stay. I looked on the hotel and travel websites to try to find the best hotels and the best deals, but had a hard time finding something that we wanted to pay for. We were just trying to get the best rate for our buck. We felt it wouldn’t be worth it to pay an extra $100 or so dollars, on top of a general hotel price for a night, and still have to drive 2 hours into the park. After almost 2-3 hours one night searching for hotels, and still not finding anything, I took a break before looking again. I then decided to go on the main website of Yosemite to see what hotels they had listed.
I was excited after a long search to have found a hotel for what seemed like a steal of a price; however, after reading more of the details I found that it was pretty much a closet for rent. The reason it was so cheap was because there was no bathroom. I was a little bummed, but happy that I am one to pay attention to details. Can you imagine how disappointed we would have been if I didn’t find out about this until I checked-in? My second attempt, I found a great hotel, the price was a little high, but it was decent for what the hotel had to offer; however, once I plugged the address into Google, it turned out that the hotel was on the other side of the mountain and would take us 4.5 hours to get into the park. Again, can you imagine how disappointed we would have been to find out about this 4.5 hour commute once we checked-in? I was bummed, but again was happy that I pay attention to details.
Finally, on the Yosemite website directory, I ended up finding a hotel about 25 minutes away from Yosemite. I was excited because I finally found one that seemed like a good deal and was close to the entrance. I am one to read reviews, and when I went to look at the reviews on this hotel, it made me skeptical about booking. A picture that I saw made me think that I was booking a room at a single building strip motel, in my experience, previous stays at motels haven’t been the nicest. I wanted to feel comfortable wherever we were going to stay.
We arrived on a Friday night and I was surprised to find that the hotel was a lot bigger and nicer looking on the outside then what I had thought it would have been based off of the pictures and reviews I had seen and read online. From how low the reviews were and in some of the comments that were made, I can say that our stay really wasn’t that bad. The hotel wasn’t a fancy city hotel or giant hotel chain, but it wasn’t run down either. I would definitely recommend this hotel to people, especially to those looking to be close to the entrance or looking for a place to stay for a night. The hotel is nothing fancy, but if anything, it is definitely worth being 25 minutes away from the entrance. We got lucky since we booked our hotel last minute, we got the room $100.00 cheaper than it would have been, so that was nice too!
We stayed at the Cedar Lodge. One nice thing about it is that you can park here on the outer area of the hotel parking lot and take transportation to the park. We were told this by the hotel staff, though I’d recommend asking again if you plan to do this. One thing to keep in mind when staying here is that you are in the mountains and you will not have phone service. Last thing to know, whether you plan to stay here or visit Yosemite in general, keep in mind that Yosemite is a wonderful place where a lot of people like to visit. My recommendation is that you arrive 30 minutes – 1 hour before the gates open to get parking. We woke up at 6:00 am and arrived just a little before 7 am. I was thankful that we stayed so close to the entrance because the parking lot filled up shortly after we arrived. When we left a little before 4:00 pm we were told by one of the workers how lucky we had been to get parking because apparently there have been people circling around for quite some time.
This was our view from around 6:30 in the morning walking from our hotel to our car to leave for Yosemite.
Look out for our next blog – Yosemite National Park – Part II to read more about our time here.
